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[wjteoh2]

Dear all engineers,

I'm carrying out a new waste-to-energy process that uses diesel as support fuel. Hence, we would like to insert diesel as a reactant for combustion in CHEMCAD. However, as we all know, diesel does not necessarily consist of only a single component, but a variety of components that may change depending on location/standard.

Would like to ask your opinion on what is the best way to represent diesel:
1. Use a single compound with similar LHV/Net Heating Value? If yes, which is the best compound to use as an analog?
2. Find some "standard" compositions of diesel and input them into the simulator? If yes, where can I get the compositions?

I tried both approaches. (1) is easy but the value is very far away from diesel. For example, if I use C12H24 as an analog, the LHV of 47 MJ/kg is much higher than, let's say 42.5 MJ/kg for No. 2 Diesel.

For (2), I'm having trouble getting a set of good compositions. Most diesel standards give mass fraction percentages in either elements (C, H, S etc.) or categories (aromatics, paraffins, napthalenes etc.) but not in terms of chemical compositions (e.g. C12H24, C12H22, C6H6, C7H8 etc.) As a side note, we generally only need to match the LHV and elemental compositions of "real" diesel, other factors (e.g. soot forming, cetane number, viscosity etc. may be ignored for now. Geographical differences in diesel supply from different countries may also be ignored for now). A quick web search turned up nothing much that's helpful.

In short, I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to represent diesel in CHEMCAD (but this may apply to other simulation software as well). Any help, discussion or sharing would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance and have a nice day!

Regards
Wei Jian